About a year ago, I was part of a group, the Technology Leader’s Forum, who was challenged to stop talking about the stuff of 21^st century education, and to start describing what the learning looks like. Since then, I’ve discovered the TPaCk framework and its emphasis on the alignment of technology, pedagogy, and curriculum. This framework has been profound in changing my thinking, and provides a glimpse of what a 21^st century classroom should look like.  Now, I pay much closer attention to the false positives that technology in the classroom can produce. A classroom equipped with an interactive whiteboard is not suddenly a 21^st century learning space if students never demonstrate their learning with it. A teacher who uses laptops/netbooks hasn’t de facto differentiated his lesson plans. And a student wiki is not necessarily an example of an essential learning, although the content in it could be. 

I hope all is going well. I’d like to say thanks to all of you for your partnership in Inspired Writing. In traveling about the schools, the early results have been nothing less than inspiring. I had the real privilege of working with 6^th graders participating in an online discussion about themselves as writers. The facilitating teacher, Tammy Falcone, shared with me how many more voices she was able to “hear”, and how the act of writing responses clarified and extended the students’ thinking process.

You know what is incredible daunting? Writing notes to a bunch of Language Arts teachers. I can feel the red pencils sharpening! However, now that we’re a couple of weeks into Inspired Writing, I just wanted to share a few resources and observations. The first is an article that, to me, strikes a balance between the challenges and opportunities of literacy in the 21^st Century. Among our challenges is the rising expectation that all our students will need to proficient writers.

We've been sharing with teachers the value of podcasting as a prewriting, revision, and publication tool for quite a while now, and many of our staff and students use tools like Audacity to capture their ideas in the writing process.  However, it can be complicated to attach the resulting .mp3 to a document or presentation and keep the resulting hyperlink intact. In other words, students might podcast a brainstorming session, link the file to a Word document, email the Word document home, and be surprised to have a dead link from the Word .doc back to the podcast file.

Hi all—please see the following opportunity for you or a staff member(s) at your school to become a “Google Certified Teacher.”  Educators who have gone through this one day session say it is amazing.  To apply, you need to submit a one minute video, described by Google as “on EITHER of the following topics: "Motivation and Learning" OR "Classroom Innovation." Be as creative as you like.”

I know that we have plenty of experts in our buildings in both motivation and innovation, so please share this opportunity with staff.  Full details and application here:  http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html

Please know that ITS will offer to help with the video capture side of the application as we can. 

Best of luck—

Mike

Littleton Public Schools are subscribers to the Discovery Network of Educational Videos, and our teachers and students make great use of the high quality, student-friendly resources.  Teachers tell us that they find the video and audio library robust, and the content is easy to integrate into their lesson plans.  Increasingly, teachers are asking the students themselves to browse the Discovery Library to find multi-media resources for research units.  Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting a couple of fourth grade teachers at Lenski Elementary.

Hello Morgridge Family Foundation Winners!  Congratulations on receiving this grant!  This is more than just an infusion of technology into your classroom; it is an investment in your ability to meet the diverse needs of today's "digital natives."  So, to get the ball rolling, please respond to the following question:  What are the unique challenges and opportunities that the 21st century learner brings to your classroom?  

Final reflection, for now, on NECC 2008.  In many ways, NECC is the perfect complement to the TIE conference.  NECC brings in speakers and practitioners from all over the country, and even the world.  It’s intriguing, and in many ways validating, to see and hear what’s going on in other places.  I’m happy to report that as I sat listening to many speakers, I could honestly say, “Oh, we do that.” I don’t pretend to think that we do it all, or that we do it all perfectly, but I would put our teachers and their practices on par with their counterparts from across the globe.  In fact, I believe that we have teachers who should be presenters at NECC; they’re simply that good.

Likewise, the TIE conference is an opportunity to witness effective strategies by educators in using technology in the classroom.  Two things are distinctly different about TIE—there are more classroom teachers presenting, and there are computers at all the sessions, which encourages active learning.  As we have in the past, Littleton...

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